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Monday, April 10, 2017

Recipe: Spring Saison, the Return of Dupont

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Well, what if life doesn’t hand you
lemons? What if you don’t care for
lemonade? What then? What if life has lead you down the road of
trying to open a Brett only brewery and then to the end of the road whence you realize
it isn’t going to happen? What do you
make with that? You make a Saison with
your favorite strain that happens to not be Brett. That’s right, I decided I needed to apologize
to me great friend Dupont for abandoning him for so long. And the reward is wonderful. I hadn’t been this excited to brew in over a
year. The beer has been on tap less than
a week and my wife is already telling me to brew it again.

I found my inspiration in one of my very first Saison recipes, the one that ended up winning second in Belgian/French ales 7 months
later. It was a beautiful bouquet of
spicy and floral hops, pepper, lemon, citrus, and mild Brett funk from the
addition of Orval dregs to the bottles, with a dry finish and spritzy carbonation. I modeled this recipe after the first.
Then on brewday… life happened. I
was only going to use a 10% each Wheat, Vienna, and Oats, on a base of Pils, but I was short on Pils and had almost no Oats. I upped the Vienna and Wheat to offset the
missing grains, and the beer still turned out great. I also had a small issue with my cold
crash creating a vacuum in my fermenter and sucking in air when I went to draw a
sample. So far I am not getting any issues with flavor from it either. So glad to have a beer like this on
tap again, especially as the temperatures warm, the trees bloom, and the yard work beckons. Rebrew scheduled for National Homebrew Day.